Cyber Petals

Okay, so I haven't posted anything in...ages. Anyway, this is a short story I wrote for Commercial Fiction. I don't claim any responsibility for the plot or anything; it was all the character's doing. Let me know what you think! It's called "Cyber Petals."

The lights went out, and the world turned upside down.
Rosie wondered why teleportation had become such a big deal to the outside world. It always made her sick.
Her stomach lurched in reaction to a particularly nasty stretch, and she cursed her grandfather.
Finally, the wretched transport ended, and she stepped off the pad and stumbled through her house to her room, where she flopped groaning on her bed. She reached for the mug on her bedside table, selected a peppermint stick from it, and popped the end of it into her mouth, hoping to soothe her stomach’s complaints. After a few minutes it was sufficiently calmed for her to roll over and contemplate her ceiling. She couldn’t remember the first time she’d taken Smart Markers to her room and proceeded to doodle all over her walls, ceiling, and furniture. She reflected that it was about time to erase her artwork and start over, as she usually did two or three times a year. She’d almost memorized her ceiling again.
She turned to examine her closet door. It needed more pictures. She’d have to remedy that soon, too. Oh, well, tomorrow began the weekend....
Suddenly, she woke up to, “Angelique Rosiere Moriset, this is the last time I’m going to call you! It’s time for dinner!”
“Coming, Mom.” She sighed and forced herself to her feet.

Supper at the Morisets’ was a simple affair as usual: TV dinners with her parents on the couch and Rosie curled in an armchair, watching some sitcom about a dysfunctional family. As she did every night, Rosie mumbled something about homework and shuffled off to her graffiti room across the hall from her parents’ clean white one. A few hours later her mother’s head poked through her doorway for a reprimand about her open window, with the night being so cold and all.
“I need the fresh air. I’ve been stuck in stuffy classrooms all day, you know,” Rosie answered.
Her parents’ bedroom door closed.

On Saturday afternoon, the sun reached down through the long grasses to wrap its rays around the short supermodel figure of a young woman with long black hair. She focused her camera and zoomed in on the spider monkey examining a mushroom. Rosie snapped the picture just before the monkey dropped all pretense of meditation by snatching and devouring the fungus. Then it loped over to her and complacently dropped itself into her lap.
“Yes, Charice, I’m very proud of you,” Rosie murmured to the monkey. She moved Charice enough to stretch out and thoroughly enjoy the sunshine. Why couldn’t the rest of the world be like this? Soft grasses blew about her, one leaf stretching down to tickle her nose in a completely random yet somehow rhythmic fashion. She could smell violets, daisies, and all other manner of flowers in full bloom. The sun’s rays warmed her face, making her skin feel like it cracked like a clay mask when she twitched her nose to avoid the teasing leaf. What made people think that any kind of technology was at all superior to nature in any way?
She cursed her grandfather again. Why had he had to go and invent the teleporter?
But there. She was ruining a perfect afternoon by ignoring the beauty around her in favor of the sour cybernetics that ruled the rest of her life. She closed her eyes and soaked.

Monday morning found her back in school. Rosie, oblivious to the teacher’s lecture, gazed around at the classroom’s prison walls, remembering a distant history lesson which had introduced the idea that classrooms had once had windows. She couldn’t imagine being able to stare out at the trees, waters, and wild beauty of the world outside while trapped in a “learning environment.” She decided that it would be sweet torment, seeing the freedom so near and being unable to reach it.
“Angelique. Would you please tell us what implications the teleporter has had for mankind, as your grandfather was instrumental in its invention?”
Rosie sighed and rattled off the answer the teacher wanted to hear—something about efficiency and more jobs, the minimization of waste and other such nonsense.
“Thank you. And consider detention your motivation to keep your mind on the lesson, rather than wherever it’s been for the last half hour or so.”
“Yes’m.”

She walked home that day, where she was welcomed by a lecture on her tardiness. After all, she was a Moriset. She of all people had no reason to be late. Rosie locked herself in her room, alternating between Smart Erasing her walls and mindlessly stroking Charice on her bed. Once her room was hospital-white again, she picked up one of the Smart Markers and held it up to a section of wall, then sighed, dropped it, and returned to her bed.

The following weekend, when she tried to go out to her meadow, she found her mother blocking the doorway to liberty.
“What? My homework’s done.”
“I’ve been getting disappointing reports from your teachers. They say you’re daydreaming in class and ignoring the lesson.”
Rosie said nothing.
Her mother waited for a moment, then prompted her. “Well?”
“Not like it’s the first time you’ve ever heard this.”
“You should have left these days in third grade, and they weren’t acceptable then.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll work on it.” Her tone bared the lie. She tried to get by her mother, but the older woman moved to block her.
“I think you should stop going out. It obviously has adverse effects on your education, your thinking.”
“No!” She shoved at her mother’s body. The freedom called to her just over the woman’s left shoulder.
Her father appeared and pulled her away. Rosie struggled and kicked, shrieking. Both parents forced her into her room and shut the door. She collapsed on her bed, her world in shards which cut her to bits. A despair beyond tears gripped her, and she dully reflected that she could not remember the last time her parents had touched her before that night.

She awoke in the blackness of midnight. Consciousness of cold, careless metal, of heartless machines, of imprisonment and slavery pressed in around the flame of hope and love of liberty. She felt herself fighting desperately, slashing at the lies and iron bars, feeling them retreat just out of her reach and return to the suffocation once more.
Rosie rushed to her window and flung the curtains apart. A full moon flooded her face, stars twinkling around it. The world, illuminated by the cool light of the metal moon, looked even wilder, in a barbaric way. She heaved at the window and smelled the iron of blood and smoke of Beltane fires. She heard the cry of a bird, and it was a scream of the innocence dying under the crushing weight of truth. Lady Moon poured herself out on a harsher world than she’d ever seen before, giving and expecting no warmth either of anger or love.
Yet something about this new outdoors was more life than behind Rosie in the black death of the house she shared with her parents. She turned around and looked at her bare room in its clutching glory, the tightness in her chest one of fear.
Better to be part of that other world. The barbaric life is better than the numb death.
Rosie stepped away from the window and felt the darkness swallow her. She gasped and staggered back into the light, shaking. I can’t.
Yet the moon stroked her cheek with fingers that burned with the cold. It called, commanded. She would survive for a little in the hideous monstrosity of the darkness. She faced the window, inhaled as much of the light as she could, and, turning again, slid through the room to the door. Hurry, her thoughts whispered as she opened it. The moon’s rays bled from her eyes.
Rosie paused outside her parents’ room and listened to the ignorance of their steady breaths—only for a moment—and then she’d slipped off down the stairs and to the last barricade between her and the wild freedom outside.
She didn’t look back as she crossed from the dark death to the bright life.

Feeling the moon sliding into her pores gave her such a feeling of exhilaration as she had never known. Rosie sucked it deep into her lungs and ran. She had finally surrendered not to the structure and numbness of the cyber world she left behind but to the pounding passions of the wilderness where she belonged.
Her feet—or was it the moon?—took her down a path she did not know, thickly overgrown and barely visible. This led her through a field and into a wood, where she slowed out of respect for the ancient wisdom in the trees’ sap. But the adrenaline still pounded in her temples, and she sped to a run again, bursting out of the trees and stopping just in time at the edge of a precipice.
Rosie stared down the cliff at an ocean which raged against the world that had spawned her but no longer held sway over her. Here, then, was liberty, for who could tame the wilds of the seas? If she were to be part of such a violent disregard, who could ever tell her no?
She glanced back over her shoulder, where the trees watched her. She turned her eyes to the moon, which pointed her back to the waters crashing below.
She spread out her arms and leaned forward, a laugh which heightened to a joyous scream tearing her throat as she fell.

Yeah, I hate the ending, too, but like I said, I didn't have anything to do with the plot. Hope you liked it and forgive me anyway!